A Commentary on the Passing Scene by
Robert Paul Wolff
rwolff@afroam.umass.edu

Coming Soon:

The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

To contact me about organizing, email me at rpwolff750@gmail.com

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Sunday, July 5, 2015

WHY I BLOG

I grew up in the Fifties.If you were White and your family had made it into the middle class, as
mine had [my father was a high school teacher and my mother was a secretary],
it was a comfortable time.But if you
had leftie leanings [which I inherited from my socialist grandfather], there
was one problem:a serious shortage of
role models.By an accident of history,
most of the young American leftwing intellectuals
from the Thirties had taken a sharp turn to the right by the time I was paying
serious attention to politics.Despite
the excitement of the Spanish Civil War and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, world
events had soured American radicals on communism, and by extension, on Marx,
socialism, and all that other good stuff.

If it wasn't the Moscow Show Trials, it was the Molotov/Ribbentrop
Pact, and if it wasn't the Molotov/Ribbentrop Pact, it was the Cold War, and if
it wasn't the Cold War, it was Israel.Whatever the reason, by the time I came along, there were precious few
grown-up mature seriously adult radicals on whom young people like me could
model ourselves.Even Sidney Hook, who
had sat with my father, my uncle Bob, and Ernest Nagel at the Norman Thomas
socialist table in the CCNY lunchroom, had turned hard right.[Each fraction of the left had its own table
in the lunchroom.Since the tables were
small, it was fortunate that the Left had splintered into innumerable tiny mutually
antagonistic fragments.]

Oh, there was William Appleman Williams, way out in the Midwest,
and a Canadian, C. B. Macpherson, and there were of course the editors of the Monthly Review, Paul Sweezy and Leo
Huberman, who for some reason did not inspire young wannabes like me.But there seemed to be a genetically encoded
law of nature that to grow old was to move to the political Right.Like graying hair and sagging pecs.

That is why Herbert Marcuse was such a big bit in the
Sixties.Nobody actually had any idea
what he was talking about, but he just smelled intractably radical, and he was
undeniably old -- ancient, even.It gave
us something to aim for.

By the time the Sixties really got started, I was a tenured senior professor at Columbia,
a member of the older generation by rank if not by age.I conceived it as my generational obligation
to demonstrate to young people, by my personal example, that it really was
possible to grow old while keeping faith with the rebellions of one's youth.

Nowadays, there are lots of us aging lefties -- one of
them is even running for President.We crop up in commune-like gatherings in
Berkeley or Hyde Park or Greenwich Village, or in such unlikely places as
Madison, Wisconsin, Carrboro, North Carolina, and Austin, Texas.The men wear what remains of their hair in
ponytails and the women eschew makeup.There
have even been TV Sitcoms about aging hippies with embarrassed conservative
children.

Why do I blog?Well, one reason is to reassure those just coming up that it really is
possible to grow old without finking out.

If anything, I find myself moving to the left as I grow older. I don't think it has anything to do with the process of aging per se. Rather, I feel radicalized by the persistent, systematic attack on public schools carried out by wealthy elites operating through the philanthropic colonialism of non-profits and through office holders in both the Republican and Democratic Parties. Maybe that's what it has taken, but better late than never.

About Me

As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.